So do you think the woman in the video is analogous to your cash-counting relative? The way I see it, her “cash” was her bent-over ass and it would’ve been there for the taking no matter what she’d been wearing. Pants, shorts, nun’s habit…doesn’t matter. Do you agree?
Except that covering up does absolutely nothing to deter a groper. Covering up isn’t like locking your doors to prevent a robbery, covering up is like praying to Mercury, God of Travelers, to prevent a robbery.
Do you really think if the waitress here had been wearing longer shorts and a loose t-shirt the creep wouldn’t have grabbed her ass? If so, why do you think that?
I guess we aren’t supposed to “advertise” that we have female bodies at all.
Maybe. Because of less temptation. Even though it turns out that such crimes are driven by a fair amount of calculation, since empirically the perps seem to spend a lot of effort looking for easy targets.
Waitresses are pretty easy targets I’m guessing, unless they work at stand-up restaurants that install security cameras and back their staff up. So let’s do more of that.
I think covering up is less like praying to Mercury and more like taking Vitamin C for a cold. Or living 3 blocks away from the nearest crack house, rather than 1. Or adding a chain lock to your door, rather than a dead-bolt. Or avoiding preservatives in your food, as opposed to avoiding excessive corn syrup, trans-fat, calories in general, and a sedentary lifestyle. Maybe it does something, you never know.
Is this a joke? I mean seriously, you are trying to parody something here, right? I don’t know what it is, but you can’t possibly be serious.
That’s at least an argument on the actual point IMO. A lot of the other comments on the various related threads seem to (pseudo) morally condemn people for pointing out that people might reduce their vulnerability to crime, including but not limited to sexual crimes against women, by modifying their behavior. Which does not mean that riskier behavior mitigates the guilt of criminals.
Here you question whether showing more/less skin has any effect on the risk of a woman being groped. I think it does, as a matter of common sense. But here’s where people should be able to disagree without falling into the logical fallacy (or cynical debating tactic, but let’s assume the former) of accusing people who think it does of sympathizing with criminals.
But also as I said on SaneBill attack/defense thread, the other thing to take into account with female servers at restaurants/bars, particularly the drinking aspect (though drinking is no excuse to commit crimes), is that the managements often want them to or even specifically require them to wear clothes which show off their bodies. If they chose completely on their own to do that, they’d still have an absolute right not to be groped. But if they believed that less provocative clothing lowered the risk of being groped (which they might believe, even if you don’t), they couldn’t necessarily do that without affecting their livelihood.
“Common sense” is nothing but “something I think everyone should believe without evidence or justification while at the same time implying that people who disagree are unintelligent.”
There is a long, ugly history of people blaming women for being raped, and the usual way this manifests is by accusing of her asking for it because what she was wearing has been as deemed insufficiently chaste. And it’s rather amazing that in the year 2018, we still see the idea about dress being a contributing factor to sexual assault being asserted as if its common sensical fact.
No, it’s not common sensical fact. As anyone should know who has been groped before, it doesn’t take much to provoke groping if one is in the presence of a groper. It’s just the easiest, most laziest thing to glom onto when one is trying to determine if the victim has a right to feel violated. It’s also a vestige of slut shaming: “good girls” don’t put themselves out there like that, “bad girls” do. And we should not be surprised and bothered when “bad girls” get what is coming to them. People don’t want to admit that this is what is going on in their heads because most of us intellectually know how backwards this thinking is, and yet the ideas still circulate and show up in threads like this one.
So there is a moral component to this that bears addressing. It’s not just about whether certain risk-mitigation strategies are effective. It’s about how the underlying motives and values we have affect our assessment of sexual impropriety and how bad it is.
Here’s a thought experiment: if there was evidence that gropers were more likely to grope waitresses wearing pants and high collar long-sleeves than more revealing outfits, would it occur to anyone to argue that women should stop dressing conservatively if they want protect themselves? I can’t imagine anyone saying this with a straight face, but we see the opposite very frequently.
The study cited earlier specifically said that rapists will seek out women they perceive as submissive. One element used to judge submissiveness is modest attire. Provocatively dressed women are seen as too confident.
If a bikini prompts sexual assault or battery, one would expect that most cases occur at the beach or a pool, since women can be reliably found wearing bikinis in such locations. That’s common sense. Women flaunting skin and triggering sexual offenders abounds at the beach. Strip clubs and nudist colonies, too. More skin, more sexual crime. Common sense!
Do they, then? The IMHO thread has a lot of examples of women wearing sweatpants or casual clothes, and contrary to common sense, those clothing choices did nothing to mitigate the risk. It’s almost like a guy looking to grope someone doesn’t care what she is wearing, but does care that he thinks he can get away with it. Waitresses are seen as “good” targets because they work in an environment where they are dependent on tips, are easily replaced, and they know it. They are not wearing sexy clothes necessarily because they are confident; it’s more likely they are required or encouraged to wear it. This makes them less likely to body slam some jackass who gets handsy.
Women have been saying in this thread, others and out loud, it doesn’t matter what we wear, it doesn’t mitigate the risk. We keep getting told that it’s just common sense that it does.
Well just to play D.A., maybe it was her belly and legs that got the groper’s attention first but the actual groping was done wherever he thought was easiest.
You almost answered your own question. This whole issue has nothing to do with what reality should be. That is a valid topic but its not the topic here. Of course no woman should ever have to dress and choose clothing with “avoiding rape” being the top critera. Or criteria at all. But there also should be no men capable or willing to rape women. There should never be anyone who engages in myriad awful/tragic/abusive behaviours. But does getting morally outraged and attacking any thoughts that stray outside the hive-mind do one fucking thing to make even one rape less likely to occur? While i can’t kniw obviously, it seems unlikely.
All this being said, I think this issue is one in which the I-guess-good-natured but condescending and infantilizing “advice” side just needs to drop it’s defensiveness and admit that what looked true and valid from a distant, uncritical view is actually much different when given a few minutes of pride-less critical thinking.
I don’t think I’ve seen a single person say anything close to the rapist/assaulter had a right to rape/assault their victim because of the victim’s state of dress. Nor have i seen anyone say it’s the woman’s fault because she showed so much skin (altho that seems debatable).
My hypothesis, closer to a WAG really, is that women are bombarded with the “watch what you wear” condescension every fucking day. And the people (men) who are earnestly if stupidly giving women this “advice” are just looking for anything for the victim to be in control of. Even if this control is ultimately only illusory, it’s as if some men just can’t accept the fact that such crime against women could really have NOTHING to do with anything within the victim’s control, short of the victim becoming an agoraphobic and never leaving the house.
The other one.
In case anyone here has missed it, there’s also this thread: Ever been groped by a stranger? What were you wearing?
If she has an attractive face, that too could’ve gotten his attention. Perhaps she was the prettiest women in the joint that night, and that put a target on her back. Maybe her body was more fit and trim than the other waitresses. Maybe she was also the best at the kind of flirty banter that makes servers extra popular and well-tipped. All eyes in the restaurant may have been on on her. And?
My rebuttal to your D.A. play would be that there is very little point in bringing up this speculation unless one is trying to argue that she should’ve done something differently to protect herself. Lots of focus on her clothes, but none on the variables described above, which also can draw attention to a woman. The only difference seems to be that we view “slutty clothes” differently than the act of being physically attractive and having an attractive personality. A woman can easily make herself less attractive by abstaining from makeup and keeping a resting bitch face, but it doesn’t occur to us to encourage this because we are generally enlightened enough to see such advice as unfairly restrictive to “good” and “bad girls” alike. But things change when we focus on clothes for some reason.
Gropers don’t gripe because they have a lack of self control. They grope because society has taught them they’re entitled to grope and that they can get away with it.
The victim’s clothing plays no role except to give everyone something to grasp onto to excuse the perpetrator.
Thank you. It’s just common sense that provocative attire is a major risk factor for getting groped. And common sense is wrong.
In case it wasn’t clear above, I think there’s some evidence that it might be minor risk factor. Just as there’s some evidence that Vitamin C will reduce colds. But discussion of dubious factors has a tendency to crowd out important ones.
Personal experience trumps common sense. But personal experience varies: there was a woman c. 1981 that believed that her scanty uniform played a role in her getting groped (though it isn’t hard to imagine that her situation made her an easy target and that was the more relevant factor).
I found another paper. Yay! https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1185&context=ny_pubs
It’s a lit review of 3 topics: number 2 is “dress and sexual violence”. There are a little under a dozen papers on that subject. Combined with the law paper, I’m willing to say that there’s a perception of a link between dress and sexual violence that I’m guessing exists in both genders (since any gender disparity would be highlighted). As for an actual relationship… here’s a key quote: [INDENT] Future research
Only two of the studies reviewed in this section directly investigated wearing sexy dress and actual violence and in both of those studies, no relationship was found. This finding contrasts with results indicating that sexy dress is linked to likelihood of sexual assault or harassment as well as to attributions of responsibility for sexual assault or harassment. Specifically, at least one group of professionals (psychiatrists) and several groups of undergraduates attributed sexual violence to women’s sexy dress. Future researchers may wish to investigate this apparent difference.
Some researchers have isolated specific dress cues (hem length, cosmetics use) that affect judgments of the likelihood of sexual violence. In the future other specific dress cues may be isolated to assess their effects. Also promising is research into individual differences in men’s history of sexual coercion and in rape myth acceptance that may contribute to attributions of women’s sexual interest when wearing sexy dress. Continued research into such individual differences in men may be useful in devising treatments in the aftermath of incidents such as coercing women to flash. [/INDENT]
^ This.
I think some men (and some women) really do have a problem with the notion that groping has NOTHING to do with what a woman is wearing. Gropers gonna grope.